Well anonfly sounds like the reasonable, sensible people I fly with 99% of the time.
It’s interesting visiting the prune website again after a few years off because there is a definite ‘tone’ to the conversation that is a bit adversarial but still some good information in amongst it all.
My opinion is that the system worked with both the flight in question and the one pictured above that diverted to Kalgoorlie. I imagine that on the Kalgoorlie diversion flight the weather was assessed at the ‘in flight re-planning point ‘ ( DPA is it?) and all the wx information was there to divert in order to remain within the rule set. On the flight that landed with 40 minutes fuel remaining I imagine they also made an assessment at the ‘ in flight re-planning point ‘ and all was well to continue to destination. No problem. Then, aviation being rather dynamic, things changed, ATC threw up extra holding, no problem, the system has standard calls to ensure clear communication between ATC and the aircraft, these standard calls were used and the aircraft landed 10 minutes before it really needed to.
As far as crew decision making around how much fuel they loaded pre-flight we don’t have enough info to compare it to what we think we would have done in their shoes but I would bet that they were limited and most of us would have done the same as them. Guess we’ll find out in a couple of years. Have a nice day everyone.